Frogdot Solutions has released a new Apache module for realm-based authentication. It allows someone to design a custom CGI/servlet to handle the actual authentication and to use custom IDs and and other data in a cookie to allow for persistent authentication throughout the Web site. The module is also capable of authenticating via IP ranges.

A very in-depth and complete Apache Mailing List archive has been created by Sander van Zoest. It was written it using XML/XSL-T and catalogs just about every Apache mailing list. It's quite impressive, even as an admitted "first cut". The archive itself is sponsored by Covalent Technologies.

jonstevens writes: "Apache Velocity is a clean room implementation of the Java based MVC template engine WebMacro and is available on the Jakarta.apache.org Web site. Velocity is an alternative to other template technologies such as JSP. Velocity is available under the non-restrictive Apache Software Foundation license (WebMacro is only available under the GPL license). It has been developed primarily by Jason van Zyl (Periapt) with sideline help from Daniel Rall (CollabNet) and Jon S. Stevens (CollabNet)."

Maktoo writes: "Just checked out the latest Netcraft survey and it has a very interesting new feature breaking out the differences between "Total Web sites hosted" and total *active* Web sites. The pie charts are about 3/4 the way down the page. They show that in total sites, Linux and MS have 35% and 21% marketshare respectively... but when it comes to actual active sites, that gap shrinks to 29.9% and 28.3% respectively. Netcraft have figured out a way to try to eliminate the millions of place holder pages out there that aren't actually serving content, thus not really Web sites. Apache's marketshare also shrinks a little, but it's still an impressive 59%. It's an interesting read."

smooc writes "The Apache Group has released the sixth Apache 2.0alpha in a row. Downloads can be found here.
Damn, and I just installed alpha5."

embo writes: "The company I work for has been approached recently by an academic organization looking for advice on providing web space for 30,000 - 40,000 users. They are limited by budget, so I'd like to recommend something with Linux and apache. They are thinking of offering around 50 MB if disk space per user (which at maximum utilization would be ~2 TB of data storage), and no database driven content (though they want to allow CGI through Perl and Python, for example)." This is a huge undertaking. Can anyone think of solutions better than the ones embo outlines below?

Ant Mitchell was first out of the gate with the submission revealing that C2Net had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by RedHat. An e-mail message was sent to all registered Stronghold customers. Interested in the details? Check out the FAQ.

(The humor impaired and underage should skip this story... No I'm not kidding.) Theorizing that the porn industry's webservers would be stronger and faster than ordinary mortals', the apparently-unscientific SmutCraft survey reveals that Apache has excellent market penetration. If you want to look at pictures, LinuxWorld.com.au's revealing barchart shows that Apache's bar is the longest. Perhaps the most surprising fact is that "billgatesnude.com" shows up on the list, and not unsurprisingly, it runs Apache. (This post is a test to answer the age old question: pr0n or politics, what generates more "Slashdot Sucks" mail *grin*)

Apache 2.0a5 seems to have gotten C|Net's attention today in an article with a few factual errors. For example, despite the misquote in the last paragraph, Apache can currently use several technologies, such as mod_perl and PHP (as modules), currently. Also, spawning a new process for each request is something Apache hasn't done in ages. Still, it's nice seeing some acknowledgement of Apache's effort!

Covalent Technologies has announced what we believe to be the first publicly acknowledged site running the latest version of Apache: Apache 2.0a5. The site also includes some nifty links that gives you a "behind the scenes" look at the resource and load demands it's making on the server. These include the standard Apache "server-status" page as well as a top dump.

Nirvani writes "Just an FYI for all you Apache diehards; The Apache Group has just announced that Apache 2.0a5 Alpha is now available. Feel free to download, test and submit your bugreports back to the Apache Group."

ASP writes "SecuritySpace.com has added a new section to their web server survey that weighs servers by the popularity of sites they host (measured by link referrals from other sites). You can see the results here , they're a little different than the ENT survey results discussed on slashdot earlier. Disclaimer: I'm an employee of of the company that publishes SecuritySpace.com" This is an interesting way to break the information down, and add a bit of depth to things.

The July Netcraft Survey shows that, of the big 3 web survers (Apache, Microsoft and iPlanet), Apache posted the largest percentage gain, with an increase of 0.28%. Weblogic was the only one that posted a larger increase, mostly due to the fast growing NameZero hosting service located at Exodus.

mholve writes "There will soon be another GUI interface for Apache available: Mohawk. Replacing TkApache with a slicker, faster and much more feature-laden interface, there is an open call for developers, comments, review." In most PC rags, the "lack" of a built-in GUI has always been a mark against Apache. It's good seeing more and more GUIs popping up to fill this real and perceived deficiency.

woggo writes "The Jakarta project quietly posted the release of ORO Matcher 2.0 this week; Dan Savarese has donated it to Apache under an open-source license. For those who don't know, ORO is a great regular expression package which supports Perl and awk-style pattern matching and substitution in Java -- something that servlet authors generally need. ORO alleged it would come out 'in early June,' but better late than never. This new version looks really cool, and requires Java 2. Download it here."

As reported by various submissions and sites, the winners of the Apache Appaloosa Awards were announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference today.

Chilliware, officially announced a set of Linux-based tools, most noteworthy for the Apache community being the Mohawk Server Configurator. According to the announcement, Mohawk is an application "wizard" designed to cut the system administration time to configure Apache by more than 50% as well as optimizing the server's setup and use. Unfortunately, more detailed information doesn't seem to be available, so we'll keep our eye on this.

Registration for ApacheCon Europe 2000 is now open. Also available online is the official session list, which was designed to be semi-"track" like. ApacheCon Europe 2000 follows closely on the heels of the very successful ApacheCon 2000 conference in Orlando, Fla., held in March and boasting over 1000 attendees.

On ApacheToday, Ryan Bloom has a writeup on the latest alpha release of Apache 2.0. He goes into detail on some of the differences between 2.0 and 1.3. He also gives a nice description on how CGI's will work in the future.

ant banks wrote to us with an article that takes issue with the Netcraft results regarding Apache's continued domination of web servers. This server looked at Fortune 500 companies and their deployment, with some differing results.